Numb To The Pop-Ups

I am sure the concept of a pop-up alert sounded like a very good one when it was first developed. It gets the user's attention and provides contextual information that the user, ostensibly, needs to know. It seems that good idea has backfired in more ways than one though. On the one hand, users have to be careful of closing pop-up windows for fear of installing malware and they employ various pop-up blockers to protect their computers from the annoyance. On the other hand, there are legitimate pop-up alerts, but they often provide too little information or too much techno-jargon for a novice user to understand. Scott Granneman points out in this SecurityFocus article how users, particularly of Microsoft Windows operating systems, are barraged with pop-ups they don't understand to the point where pop-up alerts have virtually lost their relevance.